Insurer Ignores Consumers’ Requests to Stop Calling, Alleges Class Action
Michael Maffia seeks to stop Fuego Leads and its subsidiary, Health Insurance Alliance, from violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by making telemarketing calls to consumers without consent, including calls to phone numbers listed on the national do not call…
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registry, and to consumers who have expressly requested that the calls stop, said Maffia’s class action Thursday (docket 0:24-cv-60632) in U.S. District Court for Southern Florida in Fort Lauderdale. Fuego Leads owns and operates a network of websites that it uses to generate leads for its call center, said the complaint. The company also owns and operates Health Insurance Alliance, which sells medical and dental health plans through licensed agents. “For all intents and purposes, the companies are intimately intertwined,” said the complaint, sharing the same executives, located at the same address in Fort Lauderdale and often listed together on job postings. In job postings for Health Insurance Alliance, Fuego Leads “specifically lists cold calling as a job requirement,” it said. The defendants “lack a sufficient internal do not call system,” causing consumers like plaintiff Maffia “to receive unsolicited telemarketing calls despite having requested that the calls stop,” it said. The Jacksonville, Florida, resident listed his cellphone number on the national DNC registry Dec. 14, yet he received "daily calls" from the defendants throughout February, it said. With each call, Maffia asked for his phone number to be removed from the contact list, but in most cases, the callers “would simply hang up in response,” said the complaint. The unauthorized solicitation calls that Maffia received have harmed him “in the form of annoyance, nuisance, and invasion of privacy,” it said. The calls have occupied his phone line and disturbed the use and enjoyment of his phone, it said. The calls have also caused him “significant mental distress,” it said. He can’t block the calls because the defendants almost always call “using a different phone number, and his stop requests have been disregarded,” it said.